Shoppers Drug Mart finds source of sci-fi email

Weird customer service response revealed as the work of a stealth staffer

While it’s not exactly a video that allegedly shows a mayor smoking crack, a surge of attention for an amusing email exchange between an ordinary average guy and an initially unknown Shoppers Drug Mart customer service representative raised some suspicion about its validity.

Moreover, the retailer initially claimed it couldn’t find any evidence on its servers.

So, could the entire thing have been a prank, executed from one side or the other?

The submission to customerservice@shoppersdrugmart.ca was inspired by the fact that Gardner came across promotional materials addressed directly to a “Matthew” who hadn’t lived at the residence in question for at least three years.

But was it, in fact, a dispatch from the future that fell through a time-hole?

The alleged reply from Shoppers Drug Mart is copied below — as it has appeared elsewhere in the last few days. (But! Read on for much more about this.)

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for writing us. We apologize if you have been receiving mail from Shoppers Drug Mart that was addressed to another customer. Unfortunately, we cannot comment on any research projects that we may currently be conducting. However, we would appreciate it if you could provide us with some additional information that would help us determine when the mailer you received was sent. Could you please let us know if it contained any of the following advertisements?

1) Now at Shoppers Drug Mart: EverexisCure any disease instantly with Everexis! Great for headaches, colds, cancer and more! With no known side effects, nothing can possibly go wrong!

2) 20X The Points on Meat ProductsGot the Everexis munchies? Fill your strange and unspeakable hunger and get 20X The Points!

3) 20% Off Everexis AntidoteEverexis left you slow, lumbering, and quick to anger? Take the Everexis antidote. It hasn’t been fully tested, but it certainly can’t make things any worse!

4) Hide in a Shoppers Drug Mart Refugee ShelterWith over 1,200 locations still standing across Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart is the ideal place to hold up and hide from the hoard. Ration Nativa Cheese Puffs and Life Brand Vitamins while you wait for rescue! Blood samples will be required for admittance.

If you did not see any of these promotions, please disregard this message. We will simply update our customer database. As our mailers are often sent out in advance, you may still receive additional mail over the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience while the update is processed.

Regards,Shoppers Drug Mart Customer Service

Gardner admits that it took him a few days to process the fact that the response was unique enough to share with others.

Still, wouldn’t it have been even more entertaining if the exchange were reported as factual, yet a work of dystopic fiction all its own? We asked Gardner to verify that the response was real, and he complied with a screen capture of both the email he received and the server text which delivered it.

The evidence showed that IP address in said text, the domain name and server IDs all check out as genuine.

But he didn’t want to reveal evidence that may lead a creative customer service rep at Shoppers Drug Mart to lose their job as reports suggested that management was hot on the trail of the culprit.

“It is an interesting twist but we are checking into the validity as it is obviously inconsistent with what our tone and content in a response would be to this concern,” Tammy Smitham, vice-president of communications and corporate affairs for the company, wrote to the Globe and Mail.

“So, we are investigating the origin of the response.”

Later on Wednesday, the Shoppers employee who wrote the response outed himself to the Toronto Star.

Mark Oliver, a part-time author who trains Shoppers employees on how to write back to customers — and wrote a number of the chain’s form responses — had his science fiction effort ultimately appreciated all around.

I answered a customer service letter, and now it's the most popular thing I've ever written. How strange. http://t.co/jejqGmOb1x

The retailer couldn’t deny that it gave permission for the rapper to shoot there. But its executives also couldn’t possibly endorse the portrayal of its employees as a bunch of slacker doofuses who are lecherous toward female customers.

I called, @WritingMark answered. This is the Shoppers Drug Mart legend who replied to my email.

I received a piece of mail today in my mailbox with your letterhead on it. At first I was alarmed, because any mail with “drug” in the title immediately raises a red flag with me, but then I looked you guys up and saw you were legit, so that’s not my concern.

No, my concern today is that the piece of mail was addressed to someone, Matthew [REDACTED],who is not currently a resident of this house, [REDACTED].

Naturally, I can draw one of two conclusions from this: 1) that Matthew is a previous resident of this address, and has not updated his address information with your system for over 3 years (the approximate time that I’ve lived here), in which case, please contact him about his up-to-date address information, and send no further mail to this address. Or 2), and I may be going out on a limb here, Matthew is a future resident of this address, and seemingly against the laws of causation, your computer system has this information, and prematurely mailed an advertisement to him before he’s actually lived here.

It’s this second case that I really need to delve into here, and again, hey, maybe it’s a long-shot, but I have many questions about the future, and generally don’t like passing up opportunities to address them to those who might have the answers.

Is this future address retrieval the result of some one-time glitch, or is it repeatable? Are the conditions to repeat it known? If the answer is no, I can maybe help you find out how it happened, but I’ll need access to your lab.

Has anything other than an address come from the future through this computer system? Dire warnings? Advanced technology schematics? Again, they may be difficult to interpret, and I’m pretty handy with reverse-engineering things, so access to your lab is probably required if you want me to have a look.

I’m kind of on the edge of my seat here, and my brain is frantic with possibilities for what we could do with this time-gateway you may or may not have unlocked. If it turns out the course of history is indeed pliable, not fixed, then we can maybe avoid future disasters and get a real taste of utopia in a mere matter of years. This would, all in all, be very favourable press for the Shoppers Drug Mart brand, and would definitely allow citizens like me to overlook the fact that the word “drug” is in your name.

Any info I can get about this would be most helpful. I work full-time, so access to your lab would need to fall around work hours — I’m sure we can figure something out.

Thanks! And here’s to a glorious tomorrow!

The 1st of 20 people to tweet a fav customer service moment wins a bag of Nativa Organics Cheese Puffs, for the after effects of Everexis.

Shoppers Drug Mart’s Smitham released this statement to explain the company’s position on the entire thing:

“We empower our customer service agents to make decisions on how they respond to customer concerns in a respectful way everyday.

“In this case, seeing the tone of the customer’s email, the customer service agent decided to have some fun with his response. While his response may not have appealed to everyone, we are glad that Andrew took it in the same light hearted way in which it was crafted.

“At the end of the day Andrew is a more satisfied customer (which makes us happy) and we have a few more product and campaign ideas for the future.”